


Too Little, too late

by Cards_Slash



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: ALMOST Character Death, M/M, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), soul mates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-08
Updated: 2018-05-08
Packaged: 2019-05-03 19:28:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14575992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: The newspapers liked to call him a Futurist when he did something they liked, and it suited him fine because the word tasted like victory when he said it.  Long before he’d woken up in a dark cave, before necessity had created the Iron Man suit, before tragedy had woken him up to the cost of his ignorance, his only super power had been the ability to create things that had no business belonging here andnow.Shame then, really, that all of his foresight, and all of his genius, and all of his creations couldn’t have predicted this moment.





	Too Little, too late

**Author's Note:**

> Although it will seem very much like Tony is going to die, I promise you that he does not.

The newspapers liked to call him a Futurist when he did something they liked, and it suited him fine because the word tasted like victory when he said it. Long before he’d woken up in a dark cave, before necessity had created the Iron Man suit, before tragedy had woken him up to the cost of his ignorance, his only super power had been the ability to create things that had no business belonging here and _now_. 

Shame then, really, that all of his foresight, and all of his genius, and all of his creations couldn’t have predicted this moment. 

Neither JARVIS, nor FRIDAY, nor Tony himself could have thought up the sterile smell of the doctor’s office. They couldn’t have imagined the impartial décor of the waiting room, all tones of soothing blue and soft music, quietly lulling the soon-to-be-dead into an accepting peace about the state of things. There was a pretty woman with dark hair and crisp scrubs speaking lowly to a couple at the check-in window. There was a wilting Mother in the corner, with tears in the corner of her eyes, looking at her phone with her lips clenched shut. 

Pepper was to his immediate left, looking brilliantly alive: painted in colors that were out of place in this living room. Her freckles and her red hair, her pink lipstick and bright-blue-eyes were an offensive insult of vitality in a room full of future corpses. “Tony,” she whispered. Her hand slid down his arm, slid into his palm to thread her fingers through his. She was leaning her head in against his, whispering low-and-slow so he could hear her above the nauseating silence of the room. “We shouldn’t jump to conclusions.”

They hadn’t. That was the problem. They hadn’t jumped to a single fucking conclusion and he’d ended up here. Right here, waiting for his name to be called. For the woman with a sympathetic face and a pocket of tissues to escort him to a smaller room. It was best to divide the dying, to split them into little compartments. It was easier to fall apart in smaller rooms, to cry without witnesses, to beg and bargain when it was only you, four walls, and one doctor who had nothing to offer but hope of a quick-and-painless demise.

Tony had a doctorate, but he wasn’t a doctor. He hadn’t spared too much time or energy wondering what made his body work, but he was a genius with advanced technology. The doctors were making do with MRIs and CAT scans, Tony had taught FRIDAY how to map his brain with devastating accuracy and it hadn’t taken him longer than a weekend to do it. (Maybe he’d leave that technology to the hospital in his will. Or maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he’d take it with him when he went, fuck the future and all the dying people too.)

“Mr. Stark,” was the nurse at the door, ready to shuffle him into his designated smaller room. Pepper stood up first, with a smile that could have charmed death itself, and she picked up her purse and held his hand—down the hall, to the right.

Oh, how are you today sir? Any concerns sir? Have you been taking any new medication sir? 

Formalities attended to, the nurse left them to wait again. Pepper stood and Tony sat where the dying people were always asked to see. There was a counter with a spread of medical odds and ends, tongue depressors and Q-tips and gauze pads. 

“Your blood pressure was good,” Pepper said. “We shouldn’t assume, Tony.”

He wasn’t assuming. He _knew_. Tony had seen the little monster in his head, watched it in real time as FRIDAY built it out of blue light. He’d squeezed his finger around it, moved it a centimeter this way and a centimeter that. 

You didn’t have to be a doctor, or a Futurist, to know he just wasn’t walking away from this one. (Hell, give him a few more weeks, maybe a month and he wouldn’t be walking anywhere ever again.) But Pepper was here because she loved him, she was begging him for anything, for one last minute of hope. (And he couldn’t give it, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t open his mouth, he couldn’t say, _I love you_ , or, _I’ve been wrong before_ , or _maybe you’re right, maybe we should go to Aspen this year._ )

The door opened, the doctor stepped inside with a tablet in one hand and a smile that he must have picked up in the hallway stuck on his face. “Mr. Stark,” he greeted with his hand stuck out. “Let me just say again, how grateful all of us are for everything you’ve done.”

Let us just say, again, how sad we will be when you’re dead.

“Doctor,” Pepper shook his hand with a firm smile. 

“Yes, you must be Ms. Potts.” They exchanged pleasantries because Pepper wasn’t ready to hear what the doctor wasn’t ready to say. It was a nice distraction, a little bit of small talk about the weather, and stocks, and Stark Industries recent charitable donations. “Well,” said Dr. Arren as he pulled up the rolling stool. “Before we get into the results, our options and the prognosis, I am required to ask—really the nurses should have asked—if you have _any_ idea who your soul mate might be.”

“Is that absolutely necessary?” Pepper asked.

“Unfortunately, we are required to ask.”

Tony busied himself with unbuttoning the cuff of his shirt, he rolled it up his forearm and lifted it up where the doctor could get a good look. “I’ve lost count of the number of potentials,” he said. “At least three possible since I got to the waiting room.”

For a minute, Dr. Arren’s face was caught in a mighty war, a great battle of emotions that ranged from the bottom of a low pit of humor where only the most unfortunate and pitiable bastards lived to anger, to something that leveled into a visual interpretation of _that’s fucking bad luck_. It settled there, as if the worst thing to happen to Tony Stark (today) was having a soul mark that said:

_Mr. Stark_.

“Well,” Dr. Arren said. (Things were about to get much worse.)

\--

Tony never got to tell his parents good bye. Not when it mattered, not while they were alive. He had rehearsed a thousand speeches in the shower, fine tuned them at four in the morning when he and sleep were seeing other people, and he’d thrown nothing but money into a project meant to give him a second chance to do the right thing.

He’d had the chance to watch his stupid young face tell his Mother he loved her, but it was cheating when he knew how that play ended. It wasn’t meaningless, but it wasn’t meaning _ful_ either. It had felt like enough, but that was a few months back, before he had to watch her die.

Before he looked into the face of the man that had killed her with his bare hand.

Before Steve had looked at him with blood on his face and both fists in the air, before he’d looked at him like he was _sorry_ but he wasn’t, and _He’s my friend_ meant more than Maria Stark’s life had. 

Tony had built his memory machine, he’d rewritten his history, he’d done it based on everything he knew at the time. It had given him a half-second of peace when he could kid himself into thinking it was _enough_. But his illusion was shattered, his Mother hadn’t died of unfortunate circumstances. She’d died alone, afraid, and long before her time.

Tony wouldn’t have told her that he loved her, he would have begged her to stay. He would have held onto her with both arms and every ounce of strength he had. 

\--

“Shit,” Rhodey summed up over coffee. They were swapping misfortunes and Rhodey had just lost every inch of his considerable lead. “You’re sure?”

“Yes,” Tony said. “I’m sure, the doctors are sure, Pepper is sure—it was hardest to convince her but we’re all very sure. I’ve been trying to divide up,” he rubbed his thumb against the center of his forehead, “I’ve been revising my will.”

Rhodey was the only one he could bear to tell—the only one that he had the strength to go through these stupid motions with. The only one he thought he could handle sitting across from him grasping at exhausted, placid platitudes. The only one that he cared about enough to bear the struck-dumb shock on his face, the way grief and denial set instantly into his face. It was terrible to watch, to see how his life was going to end reflected in his best friend’s eyes. 

(As terrible as it had been to listen to Pepper cry in the bathroom, to lean his head against the door and wait for it to pass.)

“What are you going to do about it?” Rhodey asked.

Tony laughed at that, “I’m good, but this is my brain.” Well, at least the part of it that hadn’t been invaded. The part of it that was still firing on all cylinders. “I wanted to tell you before the press release—I didn’t, I didn’t want you to find out that way.”

Rhodey’s hand was across his mouth, he was dumb with shock, not nodding or fighting or moving at all. When he did move, he cleared his throat, shifted on the chair and said, “what are you going to do about your soul mate?”

Tony was going to do absolutely fucking nothing about his soul mate. He had all the plausible deniability a man needed to die without first having to submit to the final, awful indignity. “I never found my soul mate,” Tony said.

Rhodey loved him, that much was true, but he was a righteous and romantic sort of guy. The type of man who was raised up on pastel dreams of life full of _perfect_ love. Rhodey must have had a book of a hundred-and-one miracles attributed to soul mates. A coffee-table hardback full of ancient art depicting soul mates as far back as time allowed. Rhodey’s Mother had loved Rhodey’s Father and they had lived together from childhood to adulthood to old age, never once spending more than one hour and sixteen minutes angry about anything the whole of their lives. Sure Rhodey was his friend, but there was no competing against a child’s faith in miracles. (Even when that child was a full grown man, paralyzed by a former ally, for what turned out to be absolutely not fucking reason.) “ _Tony_ ,” Rhodey said. 

“It’s done, Rhodey. It’s been done for a while.” It was over before it started.

\--

Tony’s romantic education had started with his Mother. (Most things started with Mothers, good, bad or indifferent). While the world had been forced to suffer through its share of _Mister_ Stark’s it had only been briefly blessed by the short tenure of _Mrs_. Stark. 

He was four (maybe, probably), three feet of skin and bones, holding out his arm to show here the script letters on his wrist. They had been tiny then, set on a tiny arm, and he’d asked her (again, again, again) what they were and what they said.

Mother told him, “Mr. Stark,” as patiently as anyone repeating themselves for the six-seven-eight hundredth time could have been. Tony said (that’s me), like double checking, like making sure it was what it was, and Mother always nodded at him, always smiled, said, “yes darling, it is you. And these,” with a brush of her thumb against his wrist, “will be the first words your soul mate ever says to you.”

When stalling at bedtime was more important than anything, Tony had begged her to tell him one-more-time exactly what a soul mate was. Mother was like Rhodey, a real believer; she told him fairy tales of happiness like she really believed, like she’d never had a moment of doubt. But he’d rewatched enough memories to wonder if sometimes, when she thought nobody would notice, some of those looks she offered husband weren’t as perfectly happy as she’d promised him.

\--

The press release went live on a Wednesday. It was a nice, warm day with a breeze; not at all a bad day to die.

“Tony,” Pepper said, “I wish you wouldn’t.”

Well, the whole of their miserable history could have been summoned up with those words. Their working relationship, friendship, and romance could all be filed under the same header. _Tony I wish you wouldn’t_. But he was shoving clothes into a bag anyway. He was walking out before he had to watch her watch him die. Maybe he’d feel differently in a week, if he could feel anything in a week, and he’d come back. But right now, he kissed her cheek, (tasted the tears she couldn’t stop shedding), “I love you,” he said when she hugged him. “I left everything to you.”

“I don’t want anything but you,” she said back, her arms were tight, her fingers were talons and her voice broke. She cried against his shoulder while he held her. He wondered at how it must feel for her, if it would feel that way for him (sooner or later) as he stood there feeling nothing at all. 

Tony was a rock. A log. A blank space where something had once been.

\--

In hindsight, (where vision was always perfect), there was really no chance that Tony would have been allowed to slink away to die alone. He hadn’t been allowed to _live_ without supervision, without curious eyes always following him, without men with big plans for the sort of things he could do, and newspaper men with loud fucking mouths coming up with ideas about what sort of man he was.

If it hadn’t been Pepper following him, it would have been Rhodey, might have been Happy, could have been anyone. 

It shouldn’t have been Peter fucking Parker at the airport, showing up to stop him at a gate he shouldn’t have known Tony was about to go through. It shouldn’t have been his regretful face, his hands rubbing together. “Mr. Stark,” Peter said, “I— I don’t know what to say, Mr. Stark. I don’t know what to _do_.” With the suit, or the money that had shown up in his bank, or the super powers he’d ended up with. Hell, maybe he didn’t know what to do with his life. With his future. Maybe he didn’t know what to do about his homeroom teacher, or his summer break. 

“Listen kid,” he said. He didn’t pull the sunglasses off his face because his head hurt, and he didn’t want to squint at the light. “Just,” he lifted his hand meant to make this a point that really stuck, “don’t forget to live, okay kid? It can feel like the only thing that matters, this superhero thing. Remember to _live_.”

Peter stuttered his footsteps when he moved forward, his upper body lurched, and Tony couldn’t have evaded him even if he’d wanted to try. He didn’t want to try because the world was narrowing down to days and weeks. His body was operational, and his time was short, and even if he felt _nothing_ , there was still a simple, overlooked comfort in being hugged. Peter didn’t cry (that was good, at least) but hug him until he had to be pushed away. He said, “I’ll do my best, Mr. Stark. Thank you—thank you for everything.”

\--

There had never been a chance for him and his soul mate. They’d met long-long after Tony had built up a tolerance for disappointment. Long after a childhood full of stupid kids finding a devious, ugly humor in the particular misfortune of having a soul mark that was nothing but your name.

He’d passed years full of breathless hope, and butterfly flutters in his heart every time anyone (peer, teacher, friend, foe) had said his last name. Oh, and how many of them had there been, how many little heartbreaks, how many failed hopes? How many embarrassments? How many disappointments?

It wasn’t his fault, and it wasn’t his soul mate’s fault. It was just forty-one years too late to matter. 

\--

Tony was prepared to die alone. It had been his plan, to quietly pass the time until there was no time left to pass. Maybe that had been the shock talking or maybe it had been the kind of peace that only came from anger.

Anger at the unfairness of it. The unfairness of everything, the anger that came from _knowing_ too late to do a fucking thing to make a difference. He hadn’t _known_ in time to save his parents. He hadn’t known in time to even tell them he loved them. 

He hadn’t known in time to stop his weapons from killing people; he hadn’t known in time to stop Obadiah. To prevent New York. To protect Pepper. To keep Ultron from ever happening. He hadn’t known about _Bucky_ , he hadn’t known about Zemo. 

He didn’t know, he didn’t pay attention, he didn’t want to _know_ who his soul mate was. He’d been sticking his fingers in his ears, eyes closed and humming as loud as he could just to keep from having to acknowledge the growing feeling of certainty. He hadn’t wanted to know.

That’s what it came down to. Tony hadn’t wanted to know it was Steve; he didn’t want to know _now_ , but he did.

He knew now, he’d known in Siberia, he’d known in the doctor’s office, he’d known when he checked into the hotel, he knew sitting with his back against the bed and the mini bar emptied out all around his legs. He _knew_ and he was still going to die alone.

\--

It, the ugliness of feeling, came back to him all at once. Like a solid punch to a drunk gut, it was a callous, sobbing laugh at the end of a long fucking week. It was a cacophonous, braying laugh in the broad hallway of this fancy hotel, leaning against one wall (because the other one, it looked unstable, it looked a bit wobbly, a bit warped, a bit like it was an inconstant in time and space) because he was fall-over-drunk (again, just like yesterday) like icing on his brain tumor cake laughing like vomit pouring out of his throat. His fingers had been, oh-so-recently, gripping the slick sides of a glass of liquor but it had slipped or fallen or he’d dropped it back a ways so it was only one of his hands on the wall and one on his own leg as his body folded forward.

“Christ, Tony,” was Steve (fucking) Rogers looking at him with pity but no empathy. It was his straight-straight back and his broad-goddamn-shoulders, looking like he’d stepped out of a magazine ad. Between the ass-hugging jeans and the stretchy hoodie trying its hardest to make Captain America inconspicuous in hallways, there was nobody in the entire hotel that wouldn’t glance at the pair of them without thinking Tony Stark had hired himself a hooker. 

He shouldn’t have thought that (but he did, in between bellows of laughs) because it was _funny_. 

“Is this your room?” The thing about good-old-Steve was (and this was _important_ ) he couldn’t let a situation go south. So, there were his hands as presumptuous as you pleased, patting down Tony’s pockets looking for a keycard. “What were you drinking?” was offended as someone’s step father, with his nose wrinkled up. 

“What _wasn’t_ I drinking?” Tony asked back. He straightened his back and smiled at Steve’s perfectly familiar face. The beard was a surprise, but the face was still the same. “If you’re going to put your hands all over me like this, Cap, I expect a happy ending.”

Steve snorted, all low and close to his face, “as if you could now.” His hand slid inside Tony’s jacket pocket and pulled out the keycard for the hotel room. “Is this your room?”

It wasn’t the first, wasn’t the last, wasn’t the only time that Tony had thought ( _I hate you_ ) but it was the first time it hurt him. It was the first time he had his hands looped in loose links around Steve’s arms when he thought it; the first time he _regretted_ it. “Yeah.”

The inside of the hotel room was perfectly clean. Steve didn’t carry and didn’t push him but all the same he seemed to be doing both at once. Inside, Tony found a wall to lean on and Steve found a middle ground to stand in. They regarded one another with suspicion, weighing the pros-and-cons of being the first to break the silence.

That was funny, when they’d been swapping words in the hallway. That was funny when he was pretty sure there was nothing-at-all he ever wanted to say to this man _ever again_ , but look at them now, taking up space in a real nice hotel in Germany. 

“What are you doing here?” Tony asked. He’d meant to ask it out there, in the hallway, when he’d walked up to find Steve Rogers lurking outside his hotel room. To demand what had brought the man back, why he thought he had the _right_. “Got tired of hiding in Wakanda?”

Steve’s hands were hovering at his hips, he was about to strike a pose and make a point, but he sighed instead. “I don’t know why I’m here.” 

That, well that was _hilarious_ in its own way. Tony pushed his shoulders back against the wall and just looked at Steve. Just enjoyed the view, just took in the scenery (so to speak) all the hard planes and slim lines of Steve’s body. He just appreciated the gruffness of the beard grown over Steve’s perfect fucking face. Like appreciating fine art, looking at Steve required concentration, it required time, it required an openness. “I didn’t invite you,” wasn’t necessary but it felt good to bring it up, to put it out there, to remind the room and the world that Anthony Edward Stark had not given in. (No of course he hadn’t, that was how he ended up here, dying alone, with a soul mate that didn’t even want to admit he was only here because it was polite, because it was expected.)

“I know,” Steve assured him. 

But there they were, nonetheless, looking at each other.

Steve scratched the beard growing on his face, looked at the floor and not at him. He was working his way around to saying something. (Maybe an apology, maybe an explanation, maybe a reason that he’d chosen Bucky over everything. Maybe a confession, maybe a regret, maybe _anything_.) 

Tony wasn’t laughing when he said, “it was you.”

Steve wasn’t smiling when he looked up again, wasn’t _shocked_ , was just nodding his head a little. “I thought it might be.” There was no explaining how sad he sounded when he said it, no telling how his shoulders slumped, and his eyes slipped sideways in their sockets. “What,” was not the sound of hope, “what are we going to do about it?”

“Don’t you think we wasted that chance?” Tony asked. 

Steve ran his tongue across his lips. “I would like to think there’s still a chance.”

Of course, he would. Tony liked to think there was still time, that all the things left undone and unsaid could be accomplished but he was still giggling drunk with his back against a hotel wall talking to an international war criminal. He was still grasping for anger in the fog of liquor clouding up all his better intentions, his mouth was quirking up at the corners, his tongue was running of with naughty notions, saying things like: “what’d you think was going to happen? Did you think I’d fall over at your feet, beg you to stay? Did you think you’d show looking like a ten dollar hooker and I’d get on my knees—” Well now, well _now_ , “I’m not saying I wouldn’t. Let’s be honest, you take your shirt off and there’s no telling what happens next.”

“Tony,” Steve said. Like snapping his fingers, like dragging them back to the _point_ , like his teachers of years ago, saying things like, _be serious_. 

“Fuck you,” Tony breathed. All those wasted giggles were sour on his tongue. “ _Fuck_ you.”

Steve-was-sorry (now. He was sorry _now_ , at the end of the line, long after it mattered. Steve was _sorry_ now. He was sorry he’d known and he hadn’t said. He was sorry that things had escalated. He was sorry he’d left Tony in Siberia with a broken suit and a fractured face. He was _sorry_ ). “There have been mistakes,” was an understatement so profound it deserved a standing ovation. “There’s still time, we can—”

“There’s no time, Cap,” Tony said. “We’re fresh out of time.”

And he’d known that. Steve had known, he must have known, because he didn’t argue it, he didn’t fight, he didn’t ask why. He just stood there like he’d _lost_ something (as if he hadn’t participated, as if it had simply happened to him). “I’m here now. I want to help.”

Well of course he did. Because Steve was an old fashion guy, a man out of time (weren’t they all, in their own way, running out of time) that believed in the nineteen-forties, that big strong men took care of their soul mates. That there was no greater power, no greater responsibility, no greater joy than spending your life with the second half of your soul. It was easy to be Steve, to think of them as two sides of the same coin. They were made to fit together: that was all there was to it.

Only they didn’t. Only, they never had. “Great,” Tony said. “You can help by leaving. I’ve got things I have to finish—things I need to do and harboring a war criminal, that—”

“I’m not leaving,” Steve said. The way he’d looked at Tony with blood on his face, saying _he’s my friend_. That was unshakeable, that tone in Steve’s voice. That was the face of a man who’d never let anything stop him; the one that had defied science, that had defied death, that had defied _time_ itself to arrive here. “I didn’t know before.”

Tony snorted. He rolled away from the wall to stumble forward, toward the minibar, in search of something to take the edge off. “Pretend you don’t. I find it works well.”

But Steve moved faster. Steve moved like a sober man, crossing the space to pull Tony up against his body. It was all bad, all wrong, all _awful_ because he was drunk and alone and miserable. Because Steve was the comfort he’d been searching for ever since he woke up to find his Mother was _dead_. Steve was the end of things, and his hands were warm on Tony’s body.

Maybe Tony had been waiting since he was born to kiss the person on the other end of the stupid mark taking up space on his wrist. Maybe he’d been wrong at sixteen, maybe he’d been right, maybe it didn’t matter here, at the end of things, because Steve Rogers was kissing him and it was every-goddamn-thing he’d been told it would be.

It was an echo of his Mother’s voice, saying _you’ll know_. He knew, as his body sagged into the touch, as he pressed back into the kiss, as he let the possibility linger and the world fade out. Oh, Tony _knew_ this was _it_. 

(He knew, and Steve knew, it was too-little-too-late.)

\--

Mornings were a bitch of a thing, always coming before you were ready for them. And always arriving with unnecessary enthusiasm. Mornings were an assault of light, sound and expectation. (Maybe that was the hangover, attacking him from the inside out, the way his brain was doing its best to kill him before he got the chance to die of old age.) 

The light came from the open curtains, the bright and undeterred light of day that saw no reason to respect a dying man’s wishes for dark and silent contemplation of his inevitable demise. It hadn’t always been that way, because Tony had almost died before, and it hadn’t been somber. It hadn’t been quiet. It was loud, brash, careless, _seething_ rage that he would be taken before his time. That he had only just begun to live the life he had been meaning to live, and it was being taken from him.

Maybe surviving death too many times set a bad precedent. Maybe it limited his options on how to react _now_. He’d fought, he’d rebelled and now he fell into line, trudging patiently toward his grave, asking for nothing but closed curtains and quiet rooms.

“Why’d you open the fucking curtains?” Tony demanded. His arm was heavy across his tired eyes, his aching body was tingling with regret for the night before. He wasn’t looking but he could _feel_ Steve was out in the room somewhere. Maybe standing by a window, maybe sitting on the floor, maybe peeking his head out of the bathroom. 

“The sun is good for you,” Steve answered.

Oh, that was a good one. A real nice jab. Tony rolled onto his side (and wondered, hangover aside, if it had always been that hard to coordinate all his limbs to work cohesively together, if this weight was new or imagined) and peeled his eyes open. “We’re well past the healing power of the sun, Steve.” 

Steve was sitting with his back against the wall, with his legs stretched out in front of him. He had the look of a man who was watching his own future die.

Tony’s head was just _aching_ , but it was still better than what was coming. Better than losing his memory and his muscle control. Better than forgetting how to talk and walk and breath. It was a living ache, a present, pulsing like a heartbeat, knocking from inside his skull. “Let me see yours,” he said.

Steve drew a breath in and held it, he unbuttoned his cuff and pulled his sleeve up just far enough the single world (C-A-P-T-A-I-N) was visible. (Was that really what they said to each other, must have been, when they met in Germany, standing tall while Loki kneeled in defeat. Mr. Stark. Captain.) “I can’t even tell you how many times someone said this to me, how many people I’ve never met before walked right up to me and said it. I’d— It was hell, never knowing, never being able to _guess_ if it was this man, this woman, this _town_ where I’d finally found the one.” His smile was like a frown, “and then I woke up here. It started all over again, I thought if anything could make living _now_ worth losing everyone I’d ever known, it would be finally finding the right person.”

Tony shoved himself up, planted his feet on the floor, scratched at his dirty hair while he waited for the snarling in his gut to quiet down enough he could make an attempt toward standing. “You do understand that I’m dying,” he said. 

“I read the press release.”

“Maybe reading comprehension isn’t your strong suit, Steve. What the fuck do I know?”

Steve didn’t even have the good grace to look embarrassed. No, he just looked at Tony like he could will the future they had no chance at into being just by refusing to give an inch. Why wouldn’t he think he could it? He’d saved Bucky, he’d saved Sokovia. He wouldn’t rest a minute until his stubbornness saved Tony too.

“It’s a brain tumor, Steve. It’s going to eat me from the inside out.” Then he stood up, because he couldn’t take it another minute, being looked at like that. He couldn’t stand the way he wanted dig his fingers in to Steve’s shoulder, to hold onto that stupid stubbornness, to take comfort in _hope_.

Maybe he didn’t have to die. Maybe there was a way. Maybe he would make it out of this. 

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Maybe he shouldn’t have slammed the bathroom door shut, but he did. Maybe he shouldn’t have drank so much the night before, but he had. Maybe wouldn’t change a fucking thing.

\--

“Did you know— When did you know?” It was the first thing Steve had tried to say to him the whole of the day. They’d passed hours in silence, acknowledging nothing but the chasm of space between them. The floor might as well have been made of lava, and the bed and table two islands. 

That kiss the night before might as well been a drunken fever dream for all the good it had done either of them. A miserable memory to keep him company, to rub his skin raw while he tried to find his way back to the apathetic calm that had gotten him this far. Feeling nothing was better, far better, infinitely better, than feeling _this_. “I think I figured it out when you were smashing the arc reactor in my chest.”

“ _Tony_.”

“When did you figure it out?”

Steve sighed, scraped his fingernail across nothing on the table top. It absorbed his concentration, the imaginary blemish he needed to remove, it consumed him. “I don’t think I did. I wasn’t _sure_. I just knew I had to find you after I heard.”

“I think I figured it out when you stood between me and the man that killed my parents, and you said _he’s my friend_.”

“Tony.”

But it _had_ been. It _had_ been that moment, the way he’d felt something crack in his chest. He’d chalked it up to betrayal, to a lost friendship. Right here, right now, it was his fist coming down hard-and-fast on the table by the bed. It was the clock being knocked back, a drawer slid open, and Tony was on his feet. “Why didn’t you figure it out? You’re _perfect_. Why didn’t you know?”

“I don’t know,” Steve said. “I’m here now.”

“You’re too fucking late,” Tony snapped, and he grabbed his shoes, and his jacket and he went out the door. Out into the hallway, to the elevator, to the lobby to the world beyond. He went into the crowds that didn’t care one way or another if he were going to live or die today. Out where he was safe with bodies all around him, where Steve wasn’t going to follow.

\--

Tony believed in science, in the pursuit of knowledge, and the idea that no fact could be accepted as absolute truth. The whole universe was a series of truths, arranged like a million stairs: every new _fact_ you learned was one little step closer to a larger truth, and not all steps were sturdy, not all steps were reliable, not all steps took you to the same place. (How could they, when there were anonymous strangers on the internet screaming about flat earths and well-intentioned parents turning down life-saving vaccines because the truth was only as true as you made it.) Science had given him a way to weigh the truths of the universe. It had provided him a community to exist in. It had given him the tools he needed to climb his own staircase, to build a few steps of his own when where he wanted to go was nowhere anyone else had thought to try.

He’d run out of steps now. He’d found a landing in the great cosmic staircase: a long and lonely plateau.

The longer he stayed, the farther away any new truth went. The longer he stayed, the more likely he was to die. (Hard to believe, fresh off a one-hundred-percent-chance-of-death diagnosis that there was anything left in the world that could lessen or increase his odds of dying. One hundred was one of those numbers, the solid, unmovable ones, that just didn’t care how you felt. One-hundred-per _cent_ was as much certainty as any mortal man was likely to get.) 

No, the choice wasn’t to find a way to avoid death, but to find a way to pass the time until that little beast with the long-long fingers finished threading itself through his brain. The only truth he had left was the identity of his soul mate.

\--

“Tony,” Steve said as soon as the door was opened. He was furious, but still inside, wearing his hooker jeans and his stretched-tight T-shirt. His face was taut with aggravation and _worry_. His hands were reaching into the space between them, because he’d been left alone in the hotel room Tony had picked to die in, wondering if he’d made the right or wrong choice. Steve was frantic energy, coming to a stop just before his outstretched hands could touch Tony. “I was worried,” didn’t seem to sum up what he’d been doing for the past four hours. It didn’t account for the open curtains, or the phone(s) on the table behind him. It didn’t make sense with the drone of the TV playing the news relaying the no-longer shocking news of Tony’s impending demise.

“I’m touched,” Tony said. 

Steve was disappointed by his sarcasm, dropping his arms and his worried smile. “I was going to come look for you,” he said. “You shouldn’t be out there by yourself—No, I don’t mean that, I mean,” (what did Steve mean? The world might never know.) “We’re in this together.”

“Oh shut up, Rogers,” Tony said. He shrugged his jacket off, threw it over the back of a chair. He toes off his shoes while he said, “we’re not in anything together, we’re not a team, we’re not friends, we’re _nothing_.” His fingers made short work of pulling his belt loose and he dropped that on the floor by the shoes. “Do you understand that?” 

“To—”

“You made a choice,” Tony said, as close to Steve as he’d ever been on purpose, “you didn’t pick me.” That was the thing, the thing to remember, the one that mattered. It had needed to be said, to be heard, to be understood just before Tony wrapped both his hands around Steve’s face and pulled him down.

Steve moved without protest; his arms were warm and thick, wrapping around Tony’s back to pull their bodies together. His mouth was slick and open, inexpert but willing. There wasn’t much room for love in the fumble of their hands and arms, in the way Steve lifted him right off his feet and carried him to the bed. 

Love didn’t account for the hurried way they stripped out of their clothes. Love didn’t scratch his fingernail’s down Steve’s perfect back. It didn’t splinter like lightning under his skin everywhere Steve’s hand’s touched.

No, it wasn’t love in the clawing, desperate, hungry way they rutted against one another. Steve’s body over his, pushing him flat against the bed and holding him there until—

\--

Steve wasn’t the first man defeated by sex; but the was the first one to sit on the side of Tony’s bed looking as if he’d lost more than he’d brought to the mattress. Naked to the skin, Steve was a work of art: a perfect, brilliant masterpiece. Tony could luxuriate in that, he could let that carry him right to the grave, taking bitter satisfaction in knowing he’d ruined Steve for anyone else.

(Or he hadn’t. They were old men now, the pair of them, long past the feverish prime of most soul mates. They’d made lives without each other, found love and heartbreak on their own. Steve had come pre-ruined, and he’d leave no worse for the wear.)

“I don’t know,” Steve said to his own hands, to the floor, to his feet, but definitely not to Tony, “that even if I had known, that I would have done anything differently. I— I want to think that I would have tried but,” Steve did look at him then, “I don’t think I could have let you kill him.”

Tony snorted, “I don’t think that matters anymore.”

“It matters. The world needs you,” Steve said.

“Fuck the world.” Wasn’t that funny, wasn’t that just _hilarious_? Which of the stages of death was he in now, which one involved carelessness, crassness, and a complete disregard for the lives of others? Which step released him from the hell of guilt and responsibility? Which one left him lying naked on a bed, bare to the world and the unflinching eyes of his soul mate? “I wasn’t the first hero, I won’t be the last.”

“Damn it, Tony,” Steve said. He stood up and what a glorious sight that was. “I’m _trying_. We don’t have to give up just because—”

“I realize you’re new to sex, but you’re really killing the afterglow with this.”

“There has to be a way to beat this.”

There _had_ to be. There _must_ be a way because Captain fucking America wanted there to be one. Because he was brand new to a realization that Tony had been working through for a few months. Maybe there had been a way six months, a year, eighteen months ago when this thing was nothing but a spec. But it was a hairy beast now, a more advanced disease than medicine had an answer for. “I didn’t realize you got a degree in oncology while you were away.”

Steve was a particularly fetching example of stupidity standing there completely naked with his hands on his hips and his lips pulled down in a frown. He had more hair on his body than Tony would have anticipated. (Funny how he couldn’t remember ever having really thought about how much hair Steve had under his clothes, and how not that he was looking, it really just did match up with what he’d anticipated. Funny how that worked.) “Why are you giving up? You’ve never given up on anything.”

Tony smiled, leaning back against the pillows, feeling benevolent and cruel. He said, “I gave up on you.”

\--

Steve had excused himself to pout in the bathroom an hour ago. Tony found a pair of pants and the TV remote and found what passed for nothing TV, just something to fill up the time and the space. He watched while he laid on the couch, reminding himself in between commercials that he hadn’t given up. That he had been defeated, that there was nothing to be done about it now.

\--

“You have to come out of there sometime,” Tony said when he was back from dinner. “Come on, Rogers. Be a big boy, come out of the bathroom.” But the door stayed resolutely closed and Tony didn’t want to turn the knob only to find it locked. 

\--

It was after dark, in a room so quiet the air sounded like static, before the door opened. Steve didn’t speak, didn’t _try_ to negotiate. No, he had the look of a man that had worked out all his possible strategies while he was in the bathroom. He had all the earmarks of acceptance, the beaten-dog-look of a man who understood he’d lost. So, he crossed the room on bare feet and invited himself into Tony’s bed. 

Steve was cool to the touch, naked everywhere, sliding right under the blankets with him. The man was a quick study of an ancient idea, because there he was, hooking one hand around Tony’s leg to roll him onto his back, to climb right in between his thighs. There was Steve’s quiet anger kissing Tony like it wasn’t too late. 

In the dark, it wasn’t ever too late. 

Tony kissed him because it was better than sleeping alone. He kissed him because it was _fucking perfect_. He ran his hands down Steve’s chest, slid under his arms, pressed his palms against his back to feel the flex and pull of muscle. He spread his legs and made room because the weight held him to this miserable earth. 

Steve kissed him until he was breathless, and he slid down, he kissed Tony’s neck. His hands were rough-callouses and artist’s fingers. His thumbs were searching and impatient, taking an inventory of every scar they found. Steve was a shape under the blankets, sliding down to mark every blemish with his damp lips and his wet tongue, traveling down-and-down until it was Steve’s hands and Tony’s hands stripping off his sleep pants. 

The space under the blankets was muggy with hot breath and warm skin. Steve’s hair was slick with seat, sliding between Tony’s fingers with ease. “Come on, Rogers,” he said to the thin air above the blankets, to the ceiling, to himself, not to the man who was stroking his dick like he had all fucking day. 

“I’ve never done this before.”

No shit. Tony shoved the blankets down, folded them over Steve’s shoulders so he could see him, poised five-or-six inches away from Tony’s dick, settled on his belly and just watching his hand slide up-and-down. “Well, a tip for the future, it’s impolite to lick your way down a man’s body if you’re not going to follow through.” He wrapped his hand around Steve’s wrist to stall his hand, he meant to explain the uncomplicated idea of sucking dick, but Steve’s face was an honest mask of disappointment. His eyebrows bunched, his lips in a frown, the smallest and most involuntary sound of disappointment humming in his throat as he regretfully stilled his hand. His grip didn’t relax but tighten first. “You’re fucking ridiculous,” Tony whispered.

“I was going to figure it out,” Steve said. But he shoved his free hand against the bed and pulled himself up to kiss him again. It was a hurtful kiss, resentful to the point of being bitchy. (Who said Captain America couldn’t be petty when the moment called for it?) Tony leaned into it, kissed back with the blunt-wet-teeth edge of rage he’d been carrying around since he’d figured it out. 

It was fucking unfair that this man was his soul mate. It was fucking unfair that they’d never had enough patience to care, to try, to realize what they could have had together. It was fucking unfair that they couldn’t change it now, that they couldn’t work it out, that they couldn’t do anything but _this_.

Tony shoved, and Steve gave, rolled onto his back without objection. Steve was a man like a fucking statue, built by the lusty Greek Gods, but he gave without fighting. He gasped with Tony’s teeth on his throat, encouraging without demanding. 

It was a heady, powerful thing for a mortal man to feel. To wrap his hands around Steve’s wrists and pin his arms over his head. Steve’s legs were bent and spread open, his lips just slightly parted, his chest lifting and falling with the rush of heated breath. “Can I fuck you?” Maybe he wanted to (of course he did, any man with a pulse would want to) or maybe he just wanted to watch Steve’s face when he heard the words. The filthy words, the implication that Steve could be fucked, that he would allow it (or maybe he would, maybe he had just been waiting). Maybe Tony just wanted to feel _anything_ that wasn’t grayness, that wasn’t defeat—

“If you want to,” Steve said with quiet-quiet words. 

_If you want to_.

Tony could have. He wanted to. He could have flipped him over and fucked him without looking at his face. (Oh-how-good that would have been.) But they didn’t have proper supplies, and even short on time as he was, Tony wasn’t desperate enough to make do. No, he kissed Steve instead. 

\--

The morning was dim, curtains-closed, warm and claustrophobic with another body under the blankets with him. Steve wasn’t sleeping, was staring at the ceiling, taking internal stock of all his thoughts while he waited. The smile on his face was automatic when Tony rolled over to look at him, an unthinking reaction to being greeted with his soul mate. “Good morning,” he said.

There was a danger in getting caught up in that kind of smile. Of letting his body lay against Steve’s. The sound of his heart beat-beat-beating on was hypnotic, like an intoxicant, the longer a man listened, the easier it was to forget all about how Tony was still going to die. 

Soul mate or no soul mate, he was going to die. “It shouldn’t have been you,” he said with his ear pressed to Steve’s chest. “It should have been Pepper. Or Rhodey. Or hell, I would have settled for Happy. I would have been Happy with Happy—it shouldn’t have been you.”

Steve’s fingers were drawing curls on Tony’s bare shoulder. He wasn’t angry, not even offended, just agreeing. “I wanted it to be Peggy.”

Just as well it wasn’t, just as well neither of them got to be happy. Tony drew in a breath and let it out again, pushed his elbow against the bed and lifted his body away. He smelled, and he was sticky, and he needed to move on before the vultures found where he was planning on dropping his body. “Well this has been nice,” he said as he scooted to the edge of the bed, “but its time to move on.”

“Tony.”

“I’m sure you’ve got someone waiting for you wherever you’re calling home these days—and I need to,” go somewhere, be somewhere, not _here_. “Try not to get arrested on your way out. I don’t have the energy to deal with watching the news coverage.”

“It’d take more men than they’ve got to arrest me,” was so profoundly arrogant that Tony had to turn around to be sure he’d heard it right. There was Steve, sitting on the edge of the bed, naked and grinning. There he was, aiming for humility and simmering pride. (He wasn’t wrong, there was no disputing that. It would take more men than they had, than any of them had, to take down Steve fucking Rogers.) “Come with me,” he said.

“Don’t do this.”

“Tony, listen—”

“Damn it, Rogers, what is it going to take? I don’t _want_ you.”

Steve clenched his jaw for just a second and then he was saying, “come to Wakanda. They have technology not even you have dreamed of yet. If there’s any chance that you can be helped, it’s in Wakanda. Please. You don’t have to stay with me, just—please don’t go without a fight.”

_The world needs you_ made much more sense when Steve Rogers was honest enough to be selfless with selfish reasons. As long as Tony was alive there was a chance, and if Tony wasn’t willing to live for the sake of the chance, he could live for the sake of the world. For the sake of living at all. “Careful, it almost sounds like you care.” 

Tony still walked away, still hid in the bathroom under the pretense of a shower.

\--

In another time, another space, another universe where things had not unfolded the same, Tony might have been sipping a drink with Rhodey, laughing lowly over absurdity while they watched the sun go down. Maybe, in that time and place, Tony might have said, _but I’m not actually petty enough to die just because I don’t want_ his _help_. In that upside-down place, Rhodey would have laughed, would have said _you are_ because Tony _was_.

\--

Out in the hotel room, Steve was dressed again. Hope was a funny look on his face, uncertain and crooked. The apprehension was knots in Steve’s shoulders, the way he kept turning his phone over and over in his hands. They both knew that Tony was stubborn enough to do anything, good or bad.

“Even if this works, nothing changes between us. You’re still you, I’m still me. We are not a we.”

Steve nodded. “It will work.”

Tony took note of his packed bag sitting on the bed, of how Steve aspired for a sheepish look and managed only to look like a naughty school kid caught with the answer key. “Did I ever actually have a choice?”

(No.) “I was going to call Pepper if I couldn’t convince you. The world really does need you, Tony. Maybe we don’t always agree about everything, but I wouldn’t want to walk into a fight thinking, I could have had Tony on my side and I don’t again.”

Good intentions were not, however, the same as choice. It was too late to back out now, too late to turn around and go back to the nothingness of the weeks before. Steve had plucked a chord in Tony’s chest. Hope was an awful thing to waste. “That’s just the euphoria talking. I haven’t changed. You haven’t changed. I’m still the same person you left in Siberia. You’re still the same man I thought was going to kill me to protect the man that murdered my Mother.”

“It wasn’t _him_ ,” Steve said like a gasp.

“You should have told me. You shouldn’t have stood there, you shouldn’t have said nothing.” But all they ‘should have’s in the world wouldn’t change where they were. Tony picked up his bag to slid the strap over his shoulder and Steve looked down at the phone weighing his arms down. “So, let’s get this over with. We can go back to pretending we don’t know.”

“Tony,” Steve said, like it mattered now after he’d won (again. Funny how it felt like losing, funny how escaping death had never felt like a defeat before), “I’m sorry.”


End file.
